Family

I was living in Milan, Italy at the time, second semester of my Junior year of college and my family had just come to visit.  We took a day trip up to the Lake Como area, a short jaunt North of Milan, and as we strolled along cobbled streets that traversed the hills surrounding the lake I got to thinking how bizarre life was at that moment.  I was living in a beautiful apartment, provided by my abroad program, in downtown Milan a few block from the famed La Scalla opera house. It must have been incredibly expensive.  Reflecting upon my circumstances a bit I started musing aloud, ‘isn’t it odd that I may be living in the most expensive apartment that I’ll ever live in and I’m probably the poorest I’ll ever be?’

To which my brother replied, ‘No man…. I could see you being poorer.’

Turns out he was right.

So here I am, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Madagascar.  It certainly wasn’t the promise of reaping great financial reward that drew me.  I’ve had to justify my life here over and over to perplexed Malagasy friends who grapple with the reality of a young American man leaving the land of promise and opportunity, forsaking family and friends, to come and subsist in Madagascar on the necessarily meager Peace Corps stipend ($4 per day).  I tell them that what I forgo in wealth, I make up for ten-fold in experience.  It could be that individuality and independence are hallmarks of American culture and create a certain restlessness in people, a proclivity to, or a need to strike out on one’s own and find life through experience.  But what gets left behind? 

I spoke with a friend the other day who, after hearing that I taught about business here said that Madagascar needs more technicians from countries that have ‘lasa lafitra’ or essentially, ‘gone far.’  Ok, fair enough I told him.  The phrasing of having ‘gone far’ implied for me some beginning point, which supposedly Madagascar is closer to, and conjured up the image of a linear progression, some road that the US is conceivably much further along.  I explained to him that if it’s the case that the US has ‘lasa lafitra’ then what I want to find out by living here is what we in America may have lost along the way.  To come here and live life as a Peace Corps Volunteer I’ve had to temporarily sacrifice family and my relationships at home, which turns out to be the great irony of my life here.  The most significant thing that I’ve left behind in order to learn what may have been lost on the road to prosperity ends up being dearest to the heart of Malagasy culture: family.          

Malagasy families are undeniably large.  If I were to quote an average number of children in a Malagasy family I would just be guessing, but judging by the number of little rascals I have running around my block, I would guess five or six to be a fair estimate.  It’s quite the jigsaw to try to puzzle all these little buggers to their respective ‘ray-aman-dreny’ or ‘parents,’ but I’ve gotten a pretty good handle on it over the past year.  It’s true that many of the demographic trends playing out all over the world are also creeping into Malagasy culture, so the average number of children in a single family is decreasing, but from what I can tell it’s still stubbornly high.  I asked a child earlier today how many brothers and sisters he had? ‘umm..betsaka,’ was all he said after a moment’s hesitation, deep in thought. ‘Lots.’  I also had an enlightening conversation about the number of children running around town with an older woman I often talk to when we pass on the road. 

‘So what do you think of Malagasy families?’ she asked.

‘They’re great. You guys sure have a lot of children,’ I proposed in order to see what she had to say about family size.

‘We sure do, that’s what Malagasy  people do.’

‘Doesn’t that get expensive, feeding everyone and sending them to school?’ I thought myself pretty clever, hoping I could slowly implant the notion in her that there was some economic link between poverty and inordinately large family sizes.

‘Yea, that’s why we’re so poor,’ she exclaimed matter-of-factly.

‘Oh.’  

So it’s true that people are aware that a large amount of kids running around can exacerbate economic hardship.  Yet kids in Madagascar don’t just eat up a family’s resources, they’re often an integral part of keeping the house running.  As soon as they’re physically old enough to handle it kids often help the mother take care of the house hold chores.  The young guys, not quite as much, but it’s incredibly common to see young girls responsible for taking care of a baby sibling or called by an overworked mother to tackle any number of chores.  Every day I see little girls, scarcely twelve years old, parading up and down the streets with a little baby swaddled in a blanket and cradled on her back.

Malagasy people also marry considerably younger than Americans.  This isn’t an official number but I’ve been told by friends that 17-20 is a pretty average marital age for Malagasy girls, whereas men wait slightly longer, maybe 22-24.  As I edge towards 25 you can imagine how obsessed my adoptive families here have become with finding me a wife. 

Once they are married gender roles are fairly prescribed, though things have begun to shift in recent years with the exposure to Western norms of gender equality.  Traditionally men go out and find money, however that might be, and the women stay home to take care of the house and tend to the family.  Farm work seems to be something that both genders share in equally which plays a substantial role in the life of most families in this predominantly agrarian society.  I’ve been told that in recent years it isn’t unheard of for women to be the ones who work and for a man to play the stay-at-home dad.  Yet it’s not quite common, and gender still plays a significant role in family dynamics.  One particularly interesting aspect that stood out to me is that though the husband often brings home the money, it is quickly relinquished to the wife, who then manages the family finances.  I was told a couple of times that this is very much a distinctive characteristic of the Malagasy family dynamic.

Something else that differentiates the practices of an average Malagasy family from those that have become commonplace in American society is the approach to old age.  Nothing will appall a Malagasy person more than hearing that in many cases, people in America are carted off to a nursing home, as opposed to moving back in with a son or daughter’s family, once they’ve grown older and lost the ability to take care of themselves.  I asked a friend the other day if grandparents often lived with their kids and got a very definite,

‘No, not usually. They often live on their own.’

‘Really?’ I asked.

‘Well yea, until they’re older and can’t take care of themselves. Then of course they do.  Where else would they live?’       

It’s been awkward before when I’ve watched a mixture of shock and befuddlement wash over the face of a Malagasy friend as another friend tries to explain what he’d heard we do to our elders in America.  For most Malagasy people the practice of spending your final years in a nursing home is ignominious, and sending your loved ones there sins against the backbone of Malagasy society, the family.     

I want to leave off with a short section of an email I sent to my parents nearly a year ago, three or so months after getting to Arivonimamo.  My dad recently thought to send it back to me after finding out I was planning to write about family:

“I have a story I’ve been meaning to tell you guys.  So I had just gotten back from the In-Service Training and was walking around Arivonimamo visiting some of the artisans and delivering some money from scarves I had sold, when one of the ladies invited me into her house.   Malagasy people are incredibly hospitable so I get ‘mandrosoa’ all the time, which basically means, ‘come on in.’  So I was delivering this lady her money and caught her just as she was slaughtering a chicken for lunch.  I sat with her for a while and watched her cook and clean the chicken.  We chatted some more while she spun some silk thread and then when the food was ready they invited me to eat with them.  She told me during lunch that her son is studying in Indonesia right now and he’ll be home in just under two years, which is crazy because he has a remarkably similar time frame to me.  Anyways, I think all the talk about her son and my situation and living abroad, and the fact that I was living a sort of analogous life to her son, got her thinking about how this must be for you guys.  So she asked me if I missed you guys.  I told her I did but that I was lucky because there were so many people like her to take me in and make me feel at home.  At that point I turned back towards her and noticed that she was teary- eyed and had been crying a bit.  The whole situation just really struck me because no matter how independent and individual I feel here, and no matter how strange my situation seems, there’s something so common about it too, or at least it speaks to how transcendent of culture the emotional ups and downs are for both me and the people I left in the States.”- August 2012

Who knows, maybe we’re not so different after all.

Until next time,

Veloma

Urbanization

Everybody has a hometown.  For Americans, independent and migratory by nature, the word hometown smacks of antiquity.  Not necessarily a place you are right now, but rather a place you were.  The American predilection for striking out on one’s own has been aided and accelerated over the years by transportation networks becoming more extensive, modes of transport getting quicker and global connectivity making it so that that even though I may be thousands of miles away mom, I can still ring you up or shoot you a text as I please. 

We don’t tend to tend to think of a population being transitory as a hallmark of growth but there does seem to be some correlation between increased movement and certain vectors of development.  Malagasy people are becoming more mobile.  Unfortunately, as history has proven time and time again, without other fundamental benchmarks also improving, a country urbanizing and people moving around more could in fact exacerbate hardship.   Such may well be the case in Madagascar.

For much of its history, and in large part persisting to present day, Madagascar’s infrastructure network left large swaths of the country disconnected from the outside world.  The meager patchwork of paved roadway that exists nowadays scarcely connects the nation’s largest population centers.  For much of the nation’s history communities across the island were desperately detached from one another.  Because of this families and communities developed a co-dependency and a fierce attachment that is characteristic of Malagasy culture.  I am often told of the primacy of family in Madagascar and more specifically how heart-wrenching it is for an average Malagasy person to be separated from their family.  Looking closely you can even see this undercurrent manifesting itself physically in the way Malagasy people interact.  Siblings will often walk around holding hands, friends, both guys and girls will hang on each other’s arms or shoulders, and the characteristically large Malagasy family will, often times due to economic necessity as much as culture, cram into a single room or two for sleeping, with many members packed into each bed. Separated from much of the outside world Malagasy communities developed unique traditional belief systems and practices or ‘fomban-drazana’ that remained insulated from any number of homogenizing forces that could have wiped them out.  I’ve gathered a good deal so far but there is still much more I have to learn before I could accurately write about some of the traditional beliefs and do them any justice.  One particular custom though, just as an example, that I’ve already touched on is the ‘Famadihana,’ or exhumation, or ‘turning of the bones’ ceremonies that are a large part of Malagasy culture in the highlands.  

This however, is the starting point of Malagasy culture.  This is the condition of life and culture in the ‘ambani-vohitra,’ or the rural countryside. What I want to stress though is the effect that urbanization appears to be having as it’s puzzled on top of this mold, both on the character of the country and the culture of its people.  Madagascar still is one of the world’s few remaining agrarian or predominantly rural nations.  This is undoubtedly sustained in large part by the abysmal condition of the nation’s roads and transportation networks.  The state is however, ever so slowly experiencing a major demographic shift as an increasing number of people move from their rural hometowns towards the larger urban centers.  A World Bank study published in 2011 notes that every year since 2005 more than 200,000 Malagasy have moved their lives from the countryside to the city and notably the number of large cities (those with more than 5000 inhabitants) has grown dramatically from 33 in 1960 to 172 in 2007. 

So the question becomes, what happens to a culture that was incubated in the rural countryside, when it is suddenly thrust into the spotlight by increased urbanization that accentuates all modes of foreign influence, be it music, fashion, film, business practices or politics?  To begin with, it starts to relentlessly emulate foreign cultures.  As with any broad observation, the generalization doesn’t hold true for all parties but a striking number of people in this country, once exposed to a foreign trend, are quick to discard their past and whole-heartedly adopt the new norm. 

I’ve asked many of my Malagasy friends to explain to me where this obsession with Western culture came from and why those with money who live in larger cities bear little resemblance to their fellow Malagasy citizens in the countryside.  I’m told that the most significant factor is that culturally Madagascar has a crippling inferiority complex brought on by the nature of French colonization here.  Decades of being treated as second-class citizens in their own country deeply imbedded the notion within Malagasy culture that they are inept, incompetent, uneducated and uncouth.  Even now, when people here discuss the French colonization and foreigners in general there is often simmering animosity tinged with a tragic capitulation to cultural envy and self-deprecation.  As an average Malagasy is distanced from life in the rural countryside, they tend to copy all things culturally Western, absorbed through increased exposure to media in larger cities, while simultaneously spurning their cultural roots.

This is not to say that a Malagasy person in an urban center wouldn’t attend a Famadihana.  As I said before, everyone has a hometown and in Madagascar that means that those in the new generation of city-dwellers often have a rural town to come back to where they can go through the motions of their ‘fomban-drazana.’  According to a friend of mine it is just that however, going through the motions, for many of those who have migrated and made their home in the city.  I was told that much of the depth and spirituality that used to accompany the noteworthy cultural events has dissipated, becoming more an opportunity for family and friends to gather together and re-unite and less a reverent homage to a traditional system of worship.  If anything many of the more significant Malagasy cultural events have adopted Christian rhetoric, as Christianity has been, and continues to be a formidable countervailing force to the fomban-drazana.          

It is not as if this shift is happening unbeknownst to the Malagasy people.  If pressed on the subject it’s apparent that they are acutely aware that urbanization is both a prominent phenomenon in Malagasy society and moreover that it’s having a tangible impact on the culture.  I spoke with my friend Jean Claude about the matter to get the opinion of someone who grew up and continues to live in the ambani-vohitra.  I was first curious if my suspicions about the cultural rift between the countryside and the city were correct.  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ he said. I wanted to know if he thought those in the city regretted the disconnection from traditional Malagasy beliefs. He didn’t think so.  And how do those who still live in the ambani-vohitra feel about the impact urbanization and its effects are having on Malagasy culture as a whole?  He told me that he felt that traditions were slowly eroding and slipping away. It worried him.

Shortly after speaking with Jean Claude I had a very enlightening conversation with another good friend who now lives in the capital city. While he elucidated for me many of the factors that have catalyzed urbanization here and the numerous consequences now manifesting across the country, it was his answer to the question about the traditional beliefs that struck me most.  When I pressed him to elaborate on the new urban population’s impressions of those in the ambani-vohitra who still hold traditional beliefs, he very diplomatically responded that though there is a segment of the city population which looks down upon those who hold onto the fomban-drazana, he feels strongly that each person is entitled to their own opinions and beliefs. Though he is a product of an urban environment, he explained to me, he feels that those in the ambani-vohitra are free to believe as they please and there is no judgment passed on his part.  This is a very positive mindset indeed, but what’s worth noting is the subtle detachment implied in the way the answer was framed and how reflective it is of the dichotomous society that urbanization has produced.  Rather than lament the loss of a set of cultural values he associates as his own, or deeply connected to his culture, my friend rather approached the issue by intimating that those who hold traditional beliefs should be afforded equality, much the way any enlightened individual might approach  a different background or ethnicity.    

More than my day to day conversations, what really triggered my thinking on the nature of urbanization here in Madagascar was my recent trip to the Morondava area.  Following my Mid-Service Conference I headed West with 9 volunteers from my training group.  It was week-long vacation that included a three day trip down the Tsiribihina River in dugout canoes, hiking in the Tsiny, Madagascar’s spiney limestone canyons, and a trip down the avenue of baobabs.  Our tour operator brought along a family member under the guise that she was our cook, not that we minded, she was great to have around, but I’m convinced she was just along for the ride.  She was a city girl, living in one of the larger, more developed urban cities, Antsirabe, roughly 3 hours south of the capital.  Her mannerisms, her clothes, her general disposition all lent the feeling that though she was Malagasy she could have easily been cut from any Western culture.  She was with us throughout the trip which included stops in a number of ambani-vohitra towns along the rivers-edge.  We would hitch our canoes along the edge of an embankment that held a small collection of huts with walls made of sticks and palm frond roofs.  We would be swarmed by half naked children who would stare wide-eyed as they tried to puzzle our blazingly white skin into an existence that had never stretched beyond that shoreline.  My favorite moment came when one of the children asked, because we were speaking Malagasy, if we were Antandroy, a Malagasy tribe based in the Southern regions of the island.  Right there and then it was perfectly encapsulated.  A perfect picture in that moment of the cultural gulf that exists in Madagascar with the two disparate ends of the spectrum coming into contact.  I wish I could know what they thought of each other.

Until next time,

Veloma   

My buddy Jean Claude

From the very beginning it seemed fated that Jean Claude would become an important part of my time here, both as my closest friend and as the corner stone of all the work I’m trying to accomplish.  Before arriving I spoke briefly with Binh, the volunteer I was replacing. 

‘You can do whatever you want, of course,’ she began, ‘but of all you could do, I really think you should work with cooperative Taratra and Jean Claude.’    

The day of my installation in Arivonimamo arrived, just over a year ago, and waiting for me by the door to my new home was Jean Claude.  My Peace Corps guardians hadn’t a clue who he was, but after a quick introduction during which I stammered out my a few basic sentences and he explained in simple Malagasy that he had worked with Binh, he promptly took hold of my trunk and helped us schlep my remaining belongings up the stairs.  The next day, as I was considering for where to begin in my new town Jean Claude showed up, once again, and hung around my apartment, listening patiently as I strung together unintelligible non-sequiturs  in my rudimentary Malagasy while he thoughtfully assembled replies using the limited vocab he knew I would understand.  Months later, well along in our work together and firmly established in our friendship, I asked him how it happened that he should so fortuitously be at my door at the very beginning of it all, at the exact moment I arrived at my new home. 

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted as he stared out the window towards the patch of pavement where Peace Corps staff had parked the day of my arrival, ‘I was just biking around town when I saw this car and had a feeling that it must be you.’

Without question, he’s an incredibly bright guy with an inquisitive mind and a predilection towards day-dreaming of the brighter days ahead.  He’s ambitious but certain factors have coalesced to affect a number of external and internal obstacles I’ve watched him stress over and struggle with during the past year.

Born in the rural village of Tsimatahodaza within the town of Ambohitrambo, Jean Claude grew up in a relatively poor farming family, ten miles outside of Arivonimamo along a stretch of cratered dirt road.  With five sisters, he was the only son born to a strong-willed father, whose penchant for control and quick-witted congeniality elevated him to Mayor of Ambohitrambo when Jean Claude was roughly seventeen.  Jean Claude was brought up under the tutelage of a man who bought his very poor family a modest and relatively comfortable life through steely determination and a conviviality that could flip on a dime to an exacting sternness when there was business to attend to.  

As the lone son Jean Claude is in many ways assumed to carry on his father’s demeanor and proclivity for leading people.  It’s a quality that I believe many of his peers presumed to be hereditary when they elected him president of the fruit-drying cooperative.  Jean Claude, however, is not his father and is in many ways his foil.  He’s confided to me that growing up, though he looked up to and respected his father, he’d always felt closer to his mother, the listener.  So while he exudes ambition, is keenly perceptive and quick to assimilate new information in a way that few others are, I noticed when I first arrived how he was cowed into silence when confronted by authority figures, and often unsure of his words when leading meetings.                 

The second contradiction I’ve observed is how bright Jean Claude truly is yet how limited his education has been.  It’s one of the most troubling parts of his life and left him for many years feeling stifled.  It wasn’t for lack of educational opportunities or family poverty that he was deprived of an education, as is the case with many children in Madagascar.  Instead, as Jean Claude describes it, during his years in what would roughly be middle school, he began having trouble with intense headaches.  His vision would shift in and out of focus, he told me, and in a fit of desperation he would focus as hard as he could, trying to concentrate until a wave of pain would wash over him and he was rendered unable to think of anything. This was his condition for four to five years of his life as he tried to finish middle school until, at his parent’s behest, he stopped going all together.

What followed was a time of serious disconnection for Jean Claude.  Disheartened by his inability to continue studying, he drifted along, helping his family sell their pineapples in the capital from time to time and trying to find a means to move forward in life.  He once expressed to me that he’d considered working for one of the local taxi-brousse organizations that coordinate inter-city travel.  Without diverging too much I should mention that in general, taxi-brousse ilk are a crass bunch and most drunken brawls that I witness on market day in Arivonimamo happen between juiced up taxi-brousse workers. Not the ideal crowd for someone with Jean Claude’s disposition. 

Discouraged as he was by his truncated education, he and his family were determined to cure his headaches and alleviate his burden.  Part of the issue however is context.  Jean Claude revealed to me at one point that he travels the ten mile road between Arivonimamo and his home in Ambohitrambo so frequently because he often feels trapped and claustrophobic in his rural village.  In the ‘ambani-vohitra’ or rural countryside, poverty is much more rampant, fewer amenities exist and opportunities to stimulate your mind are scarce.  Things were easier and people were happier in the ambani-vohitra, Jean Claude tells me, before they were exposed to all of the glitz and glam of the Western world.  Now that certain upper echelons of Malagasy society have appropriated Western customs, acquired modern amenities, and broadcast their circumstance for the rest of the country to see, people have now begun to realize their poverty.  This new consciousness creates unfulfilled desires that erode people’s contentedness, especially for the generation of youth most directly exposed to the stark dichotomies in income and lifestyle that exist in the world. 

Such is the condition that Jean Claude found himself in.  Restless in his hometown and plagued by chronic headaches that clouded his vision and kept him from studying. He tried everything, he told me.  His family took him to doctors in town, he was taken to a traditional healer in the ambani-vohitra and nothing seemed to work.  Until he began to pray.  At that point, he tells me, he began to feel the head pain recede.  He prayed diligently and considered his way forward in life until, as he tells it, he stopped having his headaches and soon after received an invitation from my counterpart organization, PROSPERER, which set he and I on the road towards meeting each other.            

Back in 2010, PROSPERER added a new project to its development arsenal which entailed gathering a group of young kids from a rural village and training them in a new-value added production technique.  The town of Ambohitrambo was an easy choice because even though it’s tucked deep into the countryside of Arivonimamo, it’s widely known that Jean Claude’s hometown produces some of the best pineapple in the entire country.  So the call went out from PROSPERER to the town’s authority figures and group of eligible young kids was culled together which included Jean Claude.  They were all sent two hours West of Arivonimamo, at PROSPERER’s expense, to the sleepy lakeside town of Ampefy, home to an expansive training center for the express purpose of drying fruit. 

With training complete, this group of young kids had seen the road forward but it was a hard road from that point onward.  The volunteer prior to me worked tirelessly to help the cooperative shape its organizational structure, register with the government, hold elections and understand some basic principles of business management.  It was during her tenure in Arivonimamo that Jean Claude was elected President of the cooperative. 

More than two years have elapsed since Jean Claude first assumed the mantle and I’ve been fortunate enough to be present and watch his evolution as a leader throughout this past year.  Prior to my arrival things were at a standstill for quite some time with the fruit-dryers.  PROSPERER in many senses saw the cooperative as their shining star.  It was a youth driven development project they had catalyzed, and in keeping with that vision they agreed to build a production house and provide certain tools. Unfortunately, from the day promises were made to the day construction began and the tools arrived, roughly two years passed.  So the cooperative sat idle, aside from the trainings conducted by the previous Peace Corps volunteer, without which, certain cooperative members have said, things would have fallen apart.

I arrived at an exciting time for both the cooperative, but even more so, for Jean Claude.  This past year the production house was completed, the tools arrived just this past month and the cooperative began its first ever independent production trials. When I first arrived, I could see in Jean Claude someone who was eager make things happen for himself, who was dedicated, inquisitive, and contemplative, but who was also discouraged by his seeming immobile station in life.  What’s more, Malagasy culture has a very hierarchical authority structure in which young people invariably defer to adults and conflict is shunned at all costs.  These are fine cultural traits but in the context of these young people attempting to start their own business, they were unquestionably detrimental.  Jean Claude and many of the cooperative members were beginning to feel jaded and browbeaten after repeated exchanges to no avail, with the numerous authority figures that buzzed around their tiny cooperative while they remained suspended in limbo.

For the first six months I watched Jean Claude churn tirelessly beneath the surface to push things forward.  He tried to hold together the cooperative against an increasingly foreboding backdrop of futility, but I watched his confidence collapse under the weight of it all as would he try to lead meetings or approach important authority figures.  The first six months I spent much of my time trying to share his burden and bolster his confidence. I thought, maybe if he didn’t feel like the lone soldier fighting the good fight, his confidence would build and he’d become the leader that the cooperative needed.  Turns out it worked.  As things began to pick up pace Jean Claude’s demeanor was transformed.  I’ve been with him most days, since the very beginning and now that the work we’re doing is beginning to pick up steam I’ve seen a fire ignite within him. He has a new found energy, a directness when conducting meetings, a plan, a will to push forward. What’s more though is his will to push others forward.  No longer in meetings are his words mumbled, his eyes downcast, his opinions lost in the fray.   He stands up straight, speaks directly, makes swift decisions and approaches authority figures with a poise that didn’t belong to him a year ago.   

I want to end with this: As I mentioned before Jean Claude became pretty spiritual during the point in his life that he was dealing with his headaches and unable to study.  He confided in me how crushed he was that he had to quit school and told me that deep down his dream had been to study management or the economy. He prayed hard during those years he told me, and is convinced that his prayers were answered,

‘All of a sudden one day this Cooperative Taratra thing came along.  And even though I can’t study and learn about the economy anymore, it’s alright, because you came to teach me about it anyway.’    

  

It’s worth mentioning too that, even though he can’t possibly understand the meaning because he speaks no English, of all the American songs we’ve listened to together in my house the one he always comes back to as his favorite is a version of ‘I’ll Fly Away’ by Allison Krauss.  To me, it only seems fitting.

Until next time,

Veloma